I’d shut my truck off at the boat launch to eat a gas-station sandwich when I saw a girl of maybe eight alone at the very end of the fishing pier, knees pulled up, nobody waiting for her anywhere. When I finally walked out there she said, “I turned nine today.” Then she told me the part that sent me back.
The sun was already halfway down into Loomis Lake, and she had no coat.
A red balloon was tied to the railing beside her, knocking the wood every time the wind came across.
Nothing about it sat right.
“Hey, sweetheart. You waiting on your folks?”
She shook her head at her sneakers.
I took the far end of the bench while an old couple at the other rail argued over who’d haul the cooler.
Her voice, when it came, was barely over the water slapping the posts.
“Nobody at my house REMEMBERED. Not ONE of them.”
I waited.
Then I got up without a word, climbed in the truck and drove off, watching her get smaller in the side glass.
Two miles up the county road I was still seeing her.
At a gas station I bought the last chocolate cupcake, a box of candles and a lighter, because mine was in my other coat.
I swung the truck around.
She hadn’t moved, and she watched me come down the pier like I might be trouble.
I pushed one candle into the frosting and lit it.
She reached. I held it back.
Then I SANG.
I’ve got the voice of a man who smoked thirty-one years, and the old couple quit fighting to stare, and I got through every word anyway.
Then I held the cupcake out and her cold hands took the paper cup.
“Blow it out and wish for something good.”
She squeezed her eyes shut so hard her whole face went tight, and dried tracks showed on her cheeks.
Then she blew, and looked straight up at me.
“So what did you ask for, birthday girl?”
“That on YOUR birthday,” she said, “SOMEBODY SINGS TO YOU.”
I’ve been hit by plenty on plenty of roads. Nothing ever landed like that.
The paper cup
I didn’t have anything to say back to that, so I told her the truth.
“Mine’s not till March,” I said. “Nobody’s sung it to me in four years.”
She looked at me like that was the saddest thing she’d ever heard.
Which was rich, coming from a kid with a balloon tied to a fishing pier.
“Why not?”
“Because the one who used to is gone.”
She nodded like she understood that. Maybe she did.
She peeled the paper cup down one side and took a bite out of the cupcake that was too big for her mouth.
Frosting got on her chin. She didn’t wipe it.
I sat back down on the far end of the bench. Far end.
I knew how it looked, a man my age and a little girl alone at the end of a pier with the sun going.
I knew it because I’d have thought it myself.
So I pulled my phone out and set it on my knee, screen up, where she could see it.
“Is there somebody I can call for you?”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“Do you know your mom’s number?”
She chewed. She looked at the balloon.
“She’s at work.”
“Where’s work?”
“County. The hospital. She’s on till eleven.”
Eleven o’clock. It wasn’t even seven yet.
“So who’s at your house right now?”
She took another bite instead of answering.
The old couple at the far rail had gone quiet, and the water kept hitting the posts under us.
“Cannon,” she said.
“Who’s Cannon?”
“Mom’s boyfriend.” She licked her thumb. “He said Mom forgot. He said she’s got bigger things than me right now.”
The case by the register
I want to back up to that gas station, because I left a part out.
It was one of those places on the county road with every light on, even in the daytime.
Two pumps that work and two that don’t. A bait cooler by the door.
I’ve been buying my supper there since my wife died.
A sandwich, a coffee, sometimes a bag of those orange peanuts nobody else eats.
The kid behind the counter is Alejandro. Maybe twenty-five.
He keeps a calendar from a tire place tacked up behind him that still says 2019, and I’ve never asked him why.
When I came in that evening I went straight to the bakery case.
There was one chocolate cupcake left, sitting in a paper cup on a tray by itself.
Next to it, taking up most of the bottom shelf, was a sheet cake under a plastic lid. White frosting, pink edges.
I couldn’t read what was written on top because there was a slip of paper taped right over the middle of it.
“I’ll take that cupcake,” I said. “And candles if you got them.”
Alejandro got the cupcake out with a square of wax paper.
“You want the cake too? I’m kidding. That one’s spoken for.”
“Whose is it?”
“Pickup order. Somebody was supposed to get it at five.” He looked at the clock over the door. “It’s paid for. I can’t sell it.”
I didn’t think about it again. Why would I?
I asked for a lighter. He tossed a red one on the counter.
I’d quit the cigarettes years back but I’ve carried a lighter every day of my life.
That night it was in the pocket of my other coat, hanging on a hook at home.
So I bought a new one, and a box of birthday candles, twenty-four to the box.
I’m telling you about the cupcake for a reason, too.
My wife used to buy me one exactly like that, every March eleventh, from a gas station.
It was a joke between us. I told her once, the year we got married, that I didn’t need a fuss.
So she gave me the least fuss a person could buy.
A gas-station cupcake and one candle, and she’d sing it at the kitchen table, loud, off-key on purpose so mine wouldn’t sound so bad next to it.
Four Marches now, and the kitchen table is where I leave the mail.
So when that girl wished somebody would sing to me, she didn’t know what she’d walked into.
She was nine. She was just being nice to an old man with frosting on his thumb.
And she’d told me what her mother’s boyfriend said about her mother.
Back on the bench I asked her, “Did your mom say anything this morning?”
“She was asleep when I left for school. She works nights some. Then days.”
“And when you got home?”
“Cannon had his friends over. For the game.” She pulled at the string of the balloon, and the balloon bobbed and knocked the rail. “I asked if we were doing cake. He laughed and said ask your mother, she forgot.”
“Where’d the balloon come from?”
“Dollar store. I had three dollars in my jar.” She said it like I’d caught her stealing. “I wanted one thing.”
So she’d bought her own birthday balloon and walked it a quarter mile to a fishing pier.
Then she’d tied it to the railing so it would look like a party.
The old woman from the far rail was walking toward us.
Ethel
She was about my age, maybe older, in a quilted vest and white sneakers with mud on the toes.
She had a fishing rod in one hand and she didn’t put it down.
Her husband stayed back with the cooler. He had the look of a man who’d lost the argument about the cooler.
“I’m Ethel,” she said. She said it to the girl, not to me. “That was some singing.”
The girl almost smiled.
Then Ethel looked at me, and I knew that look. My wife had it.
It’s the look of a woman who has already decided she’s going to be in charge of whatever happens next.
“You know her?”
“No ma’am. Never saw her before tonight.”
“You went and got her a cupcake.”
“I did.”
“Hm.” She leaned the rod against the rail. “Well. I heard most of it. That boyfriend.”
“I heard it too.”
“So what are you planning to do?”
That was a fair question, and I didn’t have an answer for it.
I’d planned the cupcake. I hadn’t planned past the candle.
“Get her home,” I said. “Make sure somebody’s there.”
“Not by yourself, you’re not.” Ethel said it flat, like reading a rule off a sign. “You don’t walk a little girl anywhere by yourself, a man you are. I don’t care how nice you sing. I’m coming.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“I wasn’t asking.” She turned to the girl. “Honey, what do we call you?”
The girl pulled her knees up tighter. “My mom calls me Bug.”
“Bug.” Ethel nodded like that settled something. “That’s a good one. Can I call you that?”
“No. Just Mom.”
Ethel laughed out loud, the kind of laugh that comes out of the nose.
“Fair enough. Birthday girl, then.”
I never did get the kid’s real name. Not that night and not after.
I asked once, later, and her mother said, “She’ll tell you if she wants to,” and the kid never wanted to.
Ethel called back down the pier. “Goldberg. I’m walking this young lady home.”
Her husband lifted a hand without turning around. I guess he’d been married to her long enough.
“He goes by his last name?” I said.
“Since 1971. His first name is worse.”
Bug wanted to bring the balloon. I untied it from the rail for her.
The knot was a good one, double, the knot of a kid who’d been told once how to tie off a boat and remembered.
She held the string in one fist and the empty paper cup in the other. She wouldn’t throw the cup away.
“Which way’s home?” Ethel said.
Bug pointed past the boat launch, up the hill where the houses start. “Dock Street. The yellow one.”
“How far?”
“Not far. I walk it.”
“By yourself? At night?”
“It’s not night yet.”
Ethel and I looked at each other over the kid’s head.
I left my truck where it was. We walked.
Ethel on one side of her, me a step behind, the balloon going ahead of all of us like it knew the way.
Halfway up the hill Bug stopped and turned around.
“If Cannon’s mad, he’s not mad at you. He’s mad at me.”
The yellow house on Dock Street
You could hear the house before you could see it.
A television turned way up. Men laughing. Somebody yelling at a referee who couldn’t hear him.
It was yellow, all right. Aluminum siding, a chain-link fence, a porch light with a dead moth in the cover.
Three pickups in the yard and one on the grass.
There were four men on the porch with a cooler of their own, which I thought about later.
The one in the middle stood up when he saw us. Big through the middle, ball cap backwards, a can in his hand. Forty, maybe.
He had a friendly face. That’s the thing I want to be honest about.
He had the friendliest face on that porch.
“There she is,” he said. “Bug. Where’d you run off to?”
“Lake,” she said.
“The lake. Course.” He laughed and looked at his buddies. “She does this. Little explorer.” Then he looked at me and Ethel. “Hey. Thanks for walking her up. Appreciate it, chief.”
“You Cannon?” I said.
“That’s me.”
“She was down at the end of the fishing pier by herself. It’s getting dark.”
“Yeah, she knows the way. She’s fine.” He held the screen door open. “Go on in, Bug. Wash up.”
She didn’t move.
“She says it’s her birthday,” Ethel said.
Cannon put a hand on his chest like he’d been shot. “I know it’s her birthday. Jeez, lady. I live here.”
“She says nobody did anything.”
“That’s her mom’s department.” He took a drink. “I’m not her daddy, I don’t keep her calendar. Jo’s been working doubles, she’s got a lot going on. It happens. Right?”
He said that last part to the men on the porch, and they nodded, because that’s what men on a porch do.
“I’d like to call her mother,” I said. “Just so she knows her girl’s home.”
Something changed in his face then. Not much. Like a window going down an inch.
“You’d like to call her mother.”
“Yes.”
“And who the hell are you, exactly?”
“Russell Yates. I was at the boat launch.”
“At the boat launch.” He came down one step. “So you’re some guy at the lake. And you bought my girlfriend’s kid a cupcake. And you walked her home. After sundown.”
“With me,” Ethel said.
“Who are you, his mother?”
One of the men on the porch, a skinny one with a phone, had it up and pointed at me.
I could see the little red light. He was grinning.
“Say hi, grandpa,” he said.
“Put that down,” Ethel said.
“It’s a free country, ma’am.”
Cannon came down another step. He didn’t come at me. He was too smart for that, with a phone going.
He just stood close, where I could smell the beer.
“Let me explain how this looks,” he said, quiet now, friendly again. “Old man. Little girl. Lake. Cupcake. You want me to call somebody? ‘Cause I’ll call somebody. And they’re gonna ask you the questions, chief, not me.”
I’m sixty-three. I’ve had men yell at me in parking lots and on job sites and once in a church.
I know when I’m being set up to look like the bad one.
The worst part was, he wasn’t wrong about how it looked.
“I just want her mother to know,” I said.
“Her mother knows where she lives.” He turned around. “Bug. Inside. Now.”
She went past him up the steps with the balloon string wound around her fist.
At the door she stopped and looked back at me. I can’t tell you what that look was. I’ve tried.
Then the screen door banged shut behind her and the inside door shut behind that.
Pump four
Ethel walked me back down the hill without saying much. That was a kindness.
Goldberg had the cooler loaded in the trunk of their Buick and was sitting in the driver’s seat with the engine running, eating a pickle out of a jar.
“You all right?” Ethel said.
“No.”
“That one on the phone is going to put you on the internet.”
“I figured.”
“You did the right thing, getting her home.”
“I got her home to him.”
She didn’t have an answer for that. Neither did I.
She wrote her phone number on the back of a bait receipt and put it in my shirt pocket like I was a kid going to camp.
“In case,” she said. In case of what, she didn’t say.
The Buick pulled out.
I sat in my truck with the window down and the sandwich still on the seat in its plastic, half eaten. I didn’t want it.
I didn’t want to go home either. There’s nothing at home but the mail on the table and a television I don’t turn on.
So I drove back up the county road to the gas station, because it was the only other place I knew to go.
And because my hands wanted a cup of coffee to hold.
It was almost nine. Alejandro was mopping by the doors with the sign out.
“You again,” he said. “You find somebody to sing to?”
“Something like that.”
I went to the coffee and poured one I wasn’t going to drink.
And I walked past the bakery case on my way back to the register, and the sheet cake was still sitting there on the bottom shelf.
Paid for. Spoken for. Five o’clock pickup, and it was nine.
I stood at that glass longer than a man should stand at a bakery case.
“Alejandro,” I said. “That cake. Can I see what it says?”
He looked at me funny. “Why?”
“Humor me.”
He came around, wiped his hands on his jeans, and slid the tray out.
He peeled the slip of paper back off the lid by one corner, careful, like it might be evidence.
Under it, in pink frosting that somebody had worked hard on:
HAPPY 9TH BIRTHDAY BUG
Nine pink candles in a circle around the words. Little sugar ladybugs at every corner of the cake.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
“You okay, man?” Alejandro said.
“Who ordered this?”
He picked up the slip and read it. “Joann. She’s a nurse at County. She comes in every morning about six, gets a large coffee, two creams. Real nice lady.” He turned it over. “She ordered it two weeks ago. Paid the whole thing up front, thirty-eight dollars. Said her boyfriend would grab it at five because she’d be on shift.”
“Did he?”
Alejandro’s face got careful.
“He came in,” he said. “About four. Big guy, hat on backwards. He bought a twelve-pack and forty dollars of scratchers. I said, hey, you want your cake while you’re here? Joann’s cake?”
“What’d he say?”
“He said he’d be back for it. Said he’d come back after the game.”
I looked down at the ladybugs.
“He said she forgot,” I said. “He told the kid her mom forgot.”
Alejandro put the slip of paper down on top of the lid, very flat.
“No,” he said. “No, she did not forget. She called me Saturday to make sure I spelled it right.”
Joann’s phone
There was a phone number on the slip.
Alejandro looked at it, and looked at me, and I could see him deciding.
“I’m not giving you her number,” he said. “No offense.”
“None taken. I wouldn’t give it to me either.”
“But I’ll call her.”
He used the store phone, the one on the cord behind the counter.
He held it between his ear and his shoulder and then he thought better of it.
He pushed the speaker button and set it on the counter between us, next to the lottery display.
It rang four times. I thought it was going to voicemail.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice, tired, a lot of noise behind her. A machine beeping somewhere.
“Joann? It’s Alejandro. From the gas station on the county road.”
“Oh. Hi, hon. What’s wrong? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I mean. It’s about the cake.”
“The cake?” She laughed a little. “Don’t tell me you spelled it wrong. He already picked it up.”
Alejandro looked at me.
“Joann,” he said. “It’s still here. The cake’s still in my case.”
There was a long nothing on the line. The machine kept beeping.
“No,” she said. “No, that’s not right. He sent me a text. Hang on.”
We could hear her moving, a door, the noise going softer.
Then her voice came back closer, like she’d put her mouth right to the phone.
“Seven-oh-two. He says, ‘Cake done. She loved it. Bug is crashed out already, happy bday to my girl.’ And a heart.” She read the heart out loud. She said the word heart.
Alejandro didn’t say anything.
He looked at me again, and this time I understood he was handing it to me.
“Ma’am,” I said. “My name’s Russell Yates. I’m sorry to be the one.”
“Who is this?”
“I’m a man who eats his supper at the boat launch. Your daughter was down at the end of the fishing pier tonight, by herself. From before the sun went down.”
“No. She’s home. He said she’s home.”
“She’s home now. A lady named Ethel and I walked her up to Dock Street about an hour ago. She’s in the house.”
“She was at the lake? By herself?”
“With a balloon she bought at the dollar store with her own three dollars.”
I heard her breathe in. Just the one breath, sharp.
“Why would she go to the lake?”
I could have said it a softer way. I’ve thought about that a lot since.
I didn’t know a softer way.
“Because when she got home from school, she asked about a cake, and he told her you forgot.”
The line went so quiet I thought she’d hung up.
“He told her I forgot,” she said.
“Yes ma’am.”
“My daughter thinks I forgot her birthday.”
“That’s what she told me. And that he said you’ve got bigger things than her right now.”
Somewhere behind her a voice called her name, and she said, “Give me a minute,” not to us.
Then she came back on.
“Alejandro,” she said. “Is he there? Russell? Is he still right there?”
“I’m here.”
“Can you get that cake to my house? I can’t get out of here for twenty minutes. I’ve got to find somebody to take my patients. Twenty minutes. Can you take it to her?”
“He’s not going to let me in, ma’am. He already about called the cops on me.”
“He doesn’t have to let you in.” Her voice had gone hard and very calm. “It’s my house. The lease has my name on it, not his. You stand on that porch with that cake and you don’t hand it to him. You hear me? You don’t let him carry it in.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Twenty minutes.”
She hung up. Alejandro was already sliding the cake into a box.
The porch rail
I called Ethel from the truck with the cake box on the passenger seat and my coffee in the cup holder, still full.
“I’ll be there,” she said. “Goldberg’s driving, he’s slow. Don’t go up without me.”
I went up without her. I wasn’t going to wait.
The game was still on. The four men were still on the porch, and the cooler was lighter.
Cannon saw me first. I watched him see the box.
“No,” he said. “No, no, no. You’re back? You’re actually back?”
I came up the walk. I didn’t go up the steps.
I set the cake box on the top of the porch rail, square, where everybody could see it, and I kept one hand flat on the lid.
“Her mom’s on her way,” I said.
“Her mom.” He came to the top of the steps. “You called Jo? How’d you get Jo’s number? You stalking my family, old man? Huh? You hear this?” He said it to his buddies, louder. “He’s stalking us now.”
The skinny one had his phone up again. The red light.
“What’s in the box?” Cannon said.
“Her cake.”
“Her cake. Okay. Okay, great, thanks, I’ll take it from here.” He held both hands out, nice and easy, like a man helping. “I’ll bring it in to her. That’s real nice of you. Go home, chief.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“Her mother said not to hand it to you.”
He laughed. It was a big laugh and it went on too long.
“Her mother said. Jo said. You talked to Jo for one minute and now you’re taking orders from Jo. Let me tell you about Jo. Jo works. That’s all Jo does. Jo works and sleeps and I’m the one here. Me. I’m the one who gets that kid off the bus. I’m the one makes her the boxed macaroni. Where’s her dad? Huh? Where’s her real dad? Not here. Me. And I’m supposed to drop everything on game day because Jo ordered a cake?”
“You told her mother the cake was done,” I said. “At seven-oh-two.”
That stopped him for about one second.
“So I was gonna get it. I was going to go after the game. You don’t know my business. You don’t know anything about this house.”
“You told the girl her mom forgot.”
“I was kidding with her. She knows I kid. Bug!” He turned and yelled at the door. “Bug, tell this guy I kid around.”
The inside door didn’t open.
“You know what, I’m done with this.” He came down a step. “You’re on my porch, you’re on my property—”
“It’s her property,” I said. “Her name’s on the lease.”
That got him. He came down the rest of the steps fast and grabbed the box, both hands.
I didn’t let go of it, and he shoved with his shoulder.
I’m sixty-three and I’ve got a bad left knee and I was standing right at the lip of the walk.
I went down on my hip on the concrete. Hard. I felt something in there go that hasn’t come all the way back.
But the box stayed on the rail, because my hand was still flat on the lid and his were on the sides.
When I went down he had to let go or go down with me.
“Jesus,” somebody on the porch said.
“He grabbed it first,” Cannon said. “You saw that. He grabbed it.”
Headlights came around the corner. A little silver car, going too fast for Dock Street.
It jumped the curb into the yard behind the fourth pickup and stopped with the engine still running.
A woman got out in blue scrubs with a hospital badge on a cord, and she didn’t close the car door.
Cannon put on the friendly face. I watched him do it, like a man putting on a hat.
“Jo. Babe. Thank God. This guy’s a creep from the lake, he’s been following Bug all night, I didn’t want to scare you—”
“You told me she blew out candles,” Joann said.
“I was gonna—”
“You sent me a heart.”
“It was a—babe, it was a figure of speech, it was a, we were gonna do it after the game, all of us, it was gonna be a surprise—”
“You told her I forgot.”
“I was joking. She takes everything so serious, Jo, you know she does, she’s just like you—”
That was when the skinny one on the porch put his phone down.
“Dude,” he said. “Come on.”
Cannon looked at him. “What?”
“You weren’t joking. You said it like four times. You said she can cry about it to her mom.” He looked at Joann and he looked sick. “He said, ‘Jo’s got bigger stuff than a kid’s birthday.’ He was laughing. We all heard it.”
Nobody on the porch said a word. The television went on cheering for somebody.
“You’re gonna side with this guy?” Cannon said. “With some old man off the street?”
“I’m not siding with anybody. I’m just saying what you said.” He picked up his keys off the porch floor. “I’m out. Sorry, ma’am. Happy birthday to her.”
The other two went with him.
Three pickups started up and backed out over the lawn, and then it was just the fourth one, and that one was Cannon’s.
“Jo,” he said. “Jo, come on. Let’s go inside and talk about this like adults.”
“Get your stuff,” she said.
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“I don’t care. You’ve got a truck. You’ve got forty dollars of scratchers.”
His mouth came open and shut again.
I don’t know who told her about the scratchers. Alejandro, probably, after he hung up with me. That kid doesn’t miss much.
“This is crazy,” Cannon said. “This is a cake. This is all over a cake.”
Joann walked past him like he was a mailbox, up the steps, and put her hand on the inside door.
“Bug,” she said. “Baby. It’s Mom. Open the door.”
The box of candles
It took him about forty minutes to load the truck. Two trash bags and a gaming system and the rest of the twelve-pack.
He made a lot of noise doing it. He said a lot of things on his way in and out. I won’t put them here.
They were the kinds of things a man says when he’s the last one to find out what everybody else in the yard already knows.
Ethel and Goldberg showed up while he was still carrying.
Ethel took one look at me sitting on the front step holding my hip and said, “I told you to wait.”
“You did.”
“Is anything broken?”
“Don’t think so.”
“You’ll have a bruise the size of a dinner plate.”
She sat down next to me on the step like we’d known each other all our lives. Goldberg stayed in the Buick. He had the pickle jar again.
Inside, through the screen, I could hear Joann and the kid. Mostly the kid.
Crying the way kids cry when they’ve been holding it in all day and somebody finally safe shows up.
Joann kept saying the same three words over and over, low. I couldn’t make out which three.
When Cannon pulled out, he leaned out the window and yelled one more thing at the house.
Then he was gone up Dock Street, and the street got very quiet.
Joann came out onto the porch. She’d been crying too.
She picked the cake box up off the rail like it weighed a hundred pounds.
“You’re Russell,” she said.
“Yes ma’am.”
“He knocked you down.”
“I sat down. Faster than I meant to.”
She almost laughed. Then she didn’t.
“I’ve got nothing to light these with,” she said. She was looking at the candles in the frosting, nine of them. “He smokes. He took the lighters. All of them. Every lighter in the house.”
I reached in my coat and got out the red one Alejandro sold me.
And the box of birthday candles, with twenty-three still in it.
“Keep them,” I said.
She took them. Her hands were shaking so hard it took her three tries to get the lighter going.
Ethel got up and held the box steady so she could get all nine.
The kid came out in her socks. She’d been crying so hard her face was blotchy all over.
She still had the balloon. She’d tied it to the back of a kitchen chair.
Now she dragged the whole chair out the door behind her so it could come too.
She looked at the cake. She read it out loud, slow, like she didn’t trust it.
“Happy ninth birthday, Bug.”
“I ordered it two weeks ago,” Joann said. “With the ladybugs. Remember you said ladybugs?”
The kid looked up at her.
“You remembered.”
“Baby. I’d never forget. I was there. I was the one there the day you were born. I’m the one who knows.”
The kid didn’t say anything to that. She just leaned into her mother’s scrubs and stayed there.
Joann looked over her head at me. “Will you sing?”
“Ma’am, you heard about my voice?”
“She told me. She said you were terrible.” She smiled, a real one. “Please.”
So we sang. All four of us, on the porch of the yellow house on Dock Street with the moth in the porch light.
Joann, Ethel, me, and Goldberg out in the Buick.
He rolled down his window and came in on the second line in a voice better than all of ours put together.
The kid blew out all nine in one go.
Then she turned around and pointed at me.
“When’s yours? Exactly. What day.”
“March eleventh.”
“Say it again.”
“March eleventh.”
She looked at her mother. “March eleventh,” she said, like she was writing it down somewhere inside.
March eleventh
The ice was mostly off Loomis Lake by then. A skin of it still hung in close by the pier posts, gray and rotten.
I shut the truck off at the boat launch and sat there with a gas-station sandwich on my knee.
I get out slower than I used to. The hip never did come all the way back.
Some mornings I can feel exactly where the concrete was.
The skinny one put the video up on the town page that night, and took it down the next morning. Long enough.
For a few weeks there, people at the bait shop looked at me a second longer than they used to.
A woman moved her cart once at the grocery. I let it go. You can’t explain yourself to a grocery cart.
Ethel calls me every other Sunday to tell me about Goldberg’s cholesterol.
Alejandro still keeps the 2019 calendar. I asked him about it, finally.
He said it had a good picture on it for October and he never got around to changing it.
It was cold out. I had my coat. The right coat, with my own lighter in the pocket.
I’d unwrapped the sandwich when a little silver car came down the hill from Dock Street and pulled in beside my truck.
Joann was driving, out of her scrubs for once.
The passenger door opened before the car had all the way stopped, and the kid got out in a puffy coat zipped up to her chin.
She was holding a paper cup in both hands, the same kind, from the same case.
It had one candle in it already lit, and her mother’s hand cupped around it against the wind.
A red balloon was tied to the side mirror, knocking the window every time the wind came across.
She marched it right up to my truck door. She didn’t wait for me to roll the window down.
Then she sang. Loud. Off-key on purpose, I’m almost sure, so mine wouldn’t sound so bad next to it.
When she got to the end she held the cupcake up to the glass.
“Blow it out,” she said, “and wish for something good.”
If you know somebody who eats supper alone in a parked truck, call them tonight before the sun’s all the way down.
For more stories about the moments that stay with us, read the woman who wore a gold lamp while her husband was getting a stent and the day a son-in-law made a public joke of his mother-in-law. And there’s the neighbor’s wife who quietly sent checks for eight months, another story with a lot beneath the surface.
